


between this world and the light

by ecotone



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: (now THERE’s a tag for a canon-compliant Eris fic), Amnesia cousins, Duress & Egress spoilers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26403883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecotone/pseuds/ecotone
Summary: Before the Pyramid ships arrive, Eris says goodbye, and dreams, and remembers.
Relationships: Eris Morn & Asher Mir
Comments: 14
Kudos: 18





	between this world and the light

Before she leaves Io, Eris visits the Pyramidion one last time. It is as grand and unknowable as ever, and she resents its mystery, its almost-open door. 

She has to leave soon, so she steals to where Asher’s things are packed— the supply ship took most of it away, but a wandering Ghost told there were some things waiting for her to come and collect. That Asher hadn’t brought them himself surprises her, but maybe he’d wanted her to take the rough-terrain pilgrimage from her campsite. One short journey before the long one. 

She shakes her head, wondering how much of the thought is projection and how much was intentionally buried in his last visit to her. 

The supplies she’d come to collect are mostly papers tucked haphazardly into weatherproof boxes, a few datapads with their passwords disabled. There are a few books, worn and dog-eared, and Eris stores them away in her bag until she can give them a proper place on her bedside table. They are not about things she is devoted to studying— essays on the Traveler’s terraforming, gravity waves and Vex-theory and time— but she will read them anyway. If nothing else, there is a rich history of underlined sentences and notes in the margins, running parallel to her private journals written in viscera. 

She does not find a note, or a letter, or anything addressed to her personally. She does not know what she’d do with one if she did. By now, she has spent so long planning her own goodbyes that it is difficult to comprehend others’, to know how to respond. 

And it had been a goodbye, in the only way they knew how. There is so rarely the luxury of an actual farewell— there are always sudden vanishings, and violent deaths, and unexplained absences. She wonders if she should have done something differently. If she could have. All she knows how to do is promise to be faithful, to fulfill her duties, just as he had done. She does not know if it is by shared blood or trauma that they are so similar in the worst ways. 

She thinks about Queen Mara’s secret language of half-truths and glances, thinks about final meetings and last words. 

She still has some of Eriana’s books. These will fit neatly next to them, in her collection of things left behind. Beneath her feet are blue-purple flowers that will soon be devoured. She picks a few, presses them between the pages of her journal. They are the color of the stone in Eleusinia, the palms of Asher’s hands. 

Her ship’s comm beeps, and she begins the long process of hauling things aboard.

* * *

She is on a great black pyramid, and she is falling. 

Io is dead and dying around her, the trees torn apart and their gnarled roots facing skyward, bloody. The fissures of blue-purple light shine oil-slick black. This moon’s fragile and volatile history, recorded in fossils and slow evolution, has been eviscerated— nonexistent, and thus unworthy of ever existing. The tree of silver wings is unbearable to look at, even in dreams. 

She sees the Vex, building and assessing and learning while being consumed, learning by being consumed— 

And she sees the Pyramidion looming just before they crash, and then she should be dead and impaled on its point but she’s not, she’s carried away by a great wave, a God-Wave, and she looks up to see a million triplet-eyes vanish under white 

and somewhere she hears herself laughing, except it’s not herself, it’s a child from a million years ago, one that had never even seen a Dreg, had no conception of the horrors that she’d see, the horrors that would be _done_ to her, that she’d do to herself— 

and she hears Asher too, child-Asher, unmangled and wry, nothing and everything like who’d he’d eventually become, by choice and by living-metal shape. And she laughs, too, because she’d never asked him if he _remembered_ , didn’t want her own scant half-memories to be altered by the knowledge. Wanted to have something out there that she chose not to know among all the things she can’t. And now she’ll never get the chance, has to submit to the thousands of probabilities just like she would’ve had to if it’d been her who crawled out of that lake. 

If there was a letter left behind, who would’ve it been addressed to? 

* * *

The one memory she hadn’t written down, because she loved it and because she still felt some lingering shame, even more discomfiting because everyone in it is long-dead: 

She is with another group of children— then-Eris would resent the term, would grasp desperately onto adulthood with both hands, even as Eris has lost these subtleties to time— and they are seeking excitement. 

So they alight upon the cabinets of some relative, gone and and now unremembered, pawing through emergency water supplies and half-empty crates before they finally stumble onto their quarry: the liquor. They are, as children, obsessed with the forbidden. 

Then-Asher, long-dead Asher, now-dead Asher is twitchy, constantly freezing at the clamor outside and glancing toward the exit. Eris hangs back alongside him, because she enjoys the plausible deniability, because she enjoys the muscle-tightening feeling of being the lookout. 

Someone with a half-remembered face gives her a glass less than a quarter full, the desire to escape unnoticed outweighing their recklessness. She takes a sip, careful; it’s watered down, even to her, barely worth trying. She pulls a face, can remember the sense-memory of it, and gives the rest to Asher. He spits it out and turns to go outside, not willing to risk punishment for something so underwhelming, and she follows. It is maybe the only time Eris can remember that they escaped someone’s wrath. 

From the rough chronology she’s pieced together from the corners of her paved-over mind, this is the last thing she remembers from her first life. She wonders at the in-betweens, what came after. If anyone alive remembers, if there is some objective record outside of what the Hidden have collected from centuries-old files. If she would want to see it, to compare it with her own mind and Medusa’s self-consuming false histories. 

She tries not to think about it, to let it rest with the millions of other questions and sorrows she’s collected. But the label on the bottle Asher left her has _better than homemade_ scratched into the corner, almost too small to read, and she wonders. The journey is long, and gives her time to think. 

* * *

She doesn’t drink it. Quietly, and hopefully, she scrounges up another glass, so that they won’t have to share next time.

**Author's Note:**

> I know it’s 4 AM but I’ve been thinking about these two since I read Duress & Egress. Eternally team “Let Eris Have Just One Good Thing, Please.” 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Comments appreciated, as always. <3


End file.
